Sadly, one of the only things I miss about my ex is his Mississippi Grandma (or G’ma as she would write on notes and cards). She died, much too young, a few years before we split. My son is named after her. I still miss her. Not just her kindness, and the way she looked out for us as a couple just starting out, but her southern cooking. She had a deep and abiding love for all foodstuffs of the south, which included - much to my dismay - way too many ways to cook with a pig. Although I stopped eating piggies when I was thirteen, I’m fairly certain that I consumed some pig fat at her house a time or two. Most times, I could discern the usual suspects (white gravy with little bits of bacon floating along), but there were a few times I wasn’t sure, and at some point, I hated to keep asking. And to her credit, much as she was set in her ways by the time she met me, I did see her make a conscious effort to use veg oil in place of the grease sometimes when I was around.
She really did everything that you might imagine a southern Grandma doing. There were hundreds of beautiful plants and blooming flowers in her yard, and she cared for each by hand (and on her hands and knees). There were several hummingbird feeders outside her kitchen window, and she loved to just sit at the table and enjoy the view. She’d bake up cookies and cakes, or a cheesy casserole, then pack it all up and head over to a friend’s for an evening of Bunco and a few drinks. There were homemade biscuits and gravy on the weekends (including a delicious tomato gravy that I convinced myself couldn’t possibly be made with bacon grease. Could it?). She harvested collard greens and squash, corn and okra and green beans from the little community garden down the street, then brought them home and cooked them down in big pots. The resulting deliciousness was then canned, or more often baggied and frozen in her giant stand-up deep freeze that she kept in the laundry room. Except for what was left out to be enjoyed immediately, which we did, to much excess.
I credit her with sparking my love for cooking. Before we lived with her for a time, the extent of my cooking experience was pretty much mac and cheese (or if it was a flush month, Velveeta Shells & Cheese) in an electric coffeepot in the dorms. Sure, I had made pancakes and grilled cheese with my parents growing up, but I had never really enjoyed the process before. I stopped eating red meat somewhere around thirteen, and at that time, I thought the height of vegetarian cooking was stuffing green peppers with rice, tofu and tomato sauce. I’m pretty sure I lived on Wheat Thins and peanut butter for the rest of high school (except when my dad decided that as a newly minted sorta-vegetarian, I should be eating pine nuts. Never mind that he had no suggestions as to what to put them on – he just read an article that mentioned they were a food that vegetarians ate).
That’s not to say that my early experiments at her house weren’t disastrous. I can distinctly remember deciding at the store one day that I should be eating eggplant and balsamic vinegar. Don’t ask me why, I really couldn’t tell you now. I had never cooked with either of these ingredients before, but into the skillet they went. Together, and alone. I guess I was hoping for some sort of vegetarian food revelation, but what I got was very brown, very bitter, kinda raw eggplant. It was inedible.
I did learn a lot from her. And one of the things that I’ve kept all these years is a stained and crumply piece of notebook paper that has a few of her favorite recipes written out by hand. Just about everything calls for “oleo.” Can you imagine? One calls for a can of Schlitz beer. Schlitz! Do they even make that anymore? That page was one of the first that I dug out and gently slid into the plastic sheet when I created my very first loose-leaf recipe binder. I’m certain that most of what she cooked wasn’t healthy by any measure. But it all came from her heart, and sometimes when you’re cooking, that’s truly all that matters.
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